Guardian Spark
by BlackRose
Summary: A collection of prompt fics examining the early life of Ironhide, oathsworn member of the Cybertronian Guard. (Ongoing, done for a prompt comm)
1. Waking (at the end)

He came to with intakes full of the sharp mineral and heated metal taste scents of a medical bay, sterile and factory impersonal, and to an emptiness in frame and spark that was sickeningly nauseating. Systems rebooted slowly, sensors onlining in trickling cascades of null values and creeping wrongness that resolved into a baseline display across his HUD that told him nothing:_ /core parameters accepted, all systems normal./_

There was an amber lit notation to the side that was blinking slowly, calmly: _/core access unlocked/_, it said, and beneath that was _/peripheral systems offline/_. It was alarming, or should have been - he was relatively sure that it ishould/i have been alarming, but he couldn't focus on it beyond the creeping nausea of the empty sense of wrongness.

Something moved in his outlying sensors, accompanied by the subdued chirp and beep of medical scanners. There was a flash of yellow and orange at the outset of his optical range - the meant-to-be reassuring colors of a medtech monitoring drone, but it wasn't at all reassuring. He couldn't recall where or when or, most importantly, _what_ had hit him that had required transfer to a larger facility than what could be had on ship. All he knew was that it definitely wasn't _their_ shipboard drone because that had long ago been altered to a dusty sort of purple on some overcharged whim of Palisade's and etched in glyphs that had less to do with prayers for the injured and more to do with prayers that the slagged thing would keep working.

It wasn't shipboard at all, he realized - he knew the feel and vibration harmonics of every engine of every class of transport the Guard used and the feel of the berth beneath him and the air around him had none of them. Station. It had to be one of the larger stations, possibly one of the ones built around a solid mass body - their gravity was set too high and the atmosphere felt thicker than it should have been in his intakes. Which meant an alpha first class med facility, but also meant he must have been well and truly slagged to need that kind of repair.

Absorbed in watching the drone go about its tasks - fluid, electrical, and spark monitors, all within stable ranges, but he was keen to know what liquid drips the drone was adjusting as several of them fed into lines spliced to his own systems - he was caught by surprise at a light touch on his opposite shoulder. It startled him, spinning a dozen automatic first response protocols up...

Errors, _/peripherals offline, systems unresponsive/_, flooded in lurid energon blue across his HUD. Secondary threat protocols, meant for backup in case of a catastrophic failure of the first, lurched him into motion - and then stopped, abruptly, entire sequence trees cut out at the root level as though they had never been.

Panic was an ugly feeling of rust and corrosion in his tanks, sour and too sharp with surging output as his engine spun up, and then _that_ cut off too, something reaching into his base code and smoothing it over cleanly as though it had never been. It left him reeling and near purging, the gnawing emptiness that he had woken to swallowing entire sectors of his processor. _/core access unlocked/_ was still displaying on his HUD and oh frag, he had thought it meant his physical core, the internal endomass bits and chassis interiors that medics were forever getting their hands into any time a mech was on a medberth, but...

Hands caught him, urging him to lay back, codes - someone else's codes - locking down his movement tiers so that he had no choice but to comply. "There," a voice was saying with that calm air specialist medic classes always seemed to have, "that's better, isn't it?"

_No._ No, it categorically wasn't, in so many ways he didn't even know where to start. There were foreign codes in his root core, overrides that had no business there, a mech he _didn't know_ - who was neither Palisade or Nitro's familiar touches - had his deepest access keys and was actively rewriting his core. He couldn't move, couldn't act, at the mercy of a stranger's control all the way down to his autonomic functions and the feeling should have been the Pit itself but all he could feel - all the medic was _letting_ him feel - was that gaping feeling of emptiness, as though he had been hollowed out inside and left behind nothing but an exoplate husk.

The medic - slim framed, unarmored, traditional red and white but without any rank markings that he could recognize - gave his shoulder another reassuring pat before reaching for his chin. That, at least, was familiar, the itching buzz of scans sweeping through his endomass and a brief burst of strobe across his spectrum vision as the medic checked responsiveness. Whatever was found seemed to please him; he gave a thin smile, brief and perfunctory, as he tapped open chart readouts along the side of the berth and flicked additional glyphs into the cascade of results. "Good," he said in that same calm croon, "that's very good. Much better than last time - not that I expect you remember that, we were keeping you under until we were sure you had stabilized. Don't worry, you're doing very well."

_Get out_, he wanted to yell. _Get out Get Out GET OUT!_ Get out of his core, get out of his code, get out of his processor, but the panicked flare of his spark couldn't reach past the deliberately smoothed lines of his coding. The medic's overrides kept everything artificially calm over the frantic seething mass of his emotional routines.

The medic flicked through another few screen of glowing glyphs, clustered into hierarchy knots of compound medical terms that he hadn't a hope of reading even if they weren't backwards from his vantage point. "Let's just start with the simple things," the medic told him gently. "Can you tell me your designation?"

He could. Of course he could, though the question opened several new probability trees, some of which were more reassuring than others. That sort of simple query was one posed to suspected processor damage, which might also explain the depth of the core access needed by medics working to repair critical memory and core injuries. He didn't remember being injured, but he might very well not.

On the other hand there were two answers to that question; one when you were sure of who was asking it, and one when you weren't. He _might_ have been injured. He might, legitimately, be under the care of a processor specialist who was rebuilding his core code after a catastrophic failure.

He might be on a station base that he didn't recognize, under the control of a medtech he didn't know, with no hint of his cohort-squadron medic's access codes left behind to reassure him. He might be flayed open, hacked clean through to his core, system protocols and base code vulnerable.

The medic was watching him, the mech's field where it lapped against his own professionally calm and impersonally pleasant. Slim physical fingers hovered over glyph charts in much the same way he could ifeel/i foreign systems layered through and over his own, blanketed and waiting. "Your designation," he was prompted gently.

There were two answers and the second, if there were any doubt, consisted of only factory model and framing date, the original base designation of an unsparked frame fresh from the assembly line. It could be traced easily with grid record access, but it was an answer that gave little away and told the asker only the bare minimum in a hostile situation.

The medic was waiting, the very picture of professional concern, but his HUD was still calmly flashing _/core access unlocked/_ and every system was laid bare in ways that were worse than it would have been if just his chassis had been cracked open. He couldn't recall how he had gotten there, he couldn't recall anything leading up to it, only the sickening emptiness of things that were imissing/i and that he couldn't remember.

'...the last time,' the medic had said, and he watched those thin multi-jointed fingers pause over indecipherable glyph charts, felt the same fingers manifest as override codes stroking lightly across his core protocol trees where nothing foreign should ever be, and wondered how many previous times there had been. He wondered what had happened those other times that he didn't remember.

He wondered, with a sick, sinking taste of rancid impurities, the gritty ice of fear, how many times he had woken and given the _wrong_ answer and what had been cut away or changed after each one.

His voice, at least, was his own, thick with the familiar sound structures of his function cant that was rife with xenophenomes that didn't exist in the medic's smooth homeworld pronunciation. "...Guardian." The first designation, the most important one, and he didn't think it was any imagination that the medic's field rippled just slightly, something peaking past that professional calm. He swallowed an acid tang that sat like ice crystals in his fluid lines. "Twelth strike squadron, lieutenant, first class."

The medic was waiting, expectant, optics bright. He cycled his own optics, as though that fraction of a nanoklik of not physically registering the mech on a visual spectrum might make the other's presence less heavily felt. "...Ironhide."

The medic smiled with his mouthplates only, not a trace of it rippling through the placid calm of his field. "Good. That's excellent, Ironhide. You're doing really well. I think that's enough for now, though, don't you?"

It was an order, not a query. Foreign code slid effortlessly through his core protocols, cutting, snipping, things falling away to emptiness and a gaping void of nothing that lurked beneath the first stage of a recharge cycle that he had no control over and his last thought was to desperately wonder if he would remember that waking, or his own designation, the next time they let him reboot.


	2. Insomnia

It was quiet in the off-rotation shift - too quiet, the very atmosphere still and heavy or, worse, moving in all the wrong ways. There was no hum in either the air or the berth beneath his backplates, none of the familiar harmonics of engines that were all he had ever known, and the absence was a thousand times more noticeable in the quiet than it was otherwise.

The gravity was set wrong. He kept coming back to that, endlessly, an instinctive first assessment that pinged relentlessly against his processor. The gravity was set wrong, Ironhide had had to shift his hydraulics and vent systems higher to compensate. Optics shuttered, he focused on that because the alternative was focusing on the Pit slagging _quiet_ and how his first protocol response to _that_ was a sparkburst of panic because the atmo-control were off, there's a malfunction, the temperature was already dropping, the ship circulation dead, engines silent, and there was no worse thing for a ship in the black than the loss of power and function.

Except there was no malfunction and the gravity was precisely what it should be for a planetary mass with Cybertron's core density and spin. Hydraulics and stabilizers calibrated for movement on ship and in zero-g had betrayed him in the planetary gravity well, giving his steps a heavy, lumbering quality and made his movements too slow and clumsy. It had been another thing for them to mock, along with the xenophonemes of the Guard cant in his speech and the wide-opticed disbelief which was all he could direct to the towering habitat levels of his native planet.

Millions of sparks pressed into close proximity, covering every span of the planet surface. Millions of lives going about their business from one rotation to the next. A triple dozen sparks within the Academy dormitory alone, and the young Guardian swore he could _feel_ every one of them, prickling pings against his sensors in ways that had nothing to do with the longed-for warm press of his cohort, his plates clamped tight to his own frame and bereft of that familiar crushing weight.

Millions of sparks, and his oath sworn duty to _protect_ them. It was a null function equation, an impossible quandary when he was one spark, alone, and he understood now why Wildstrike had insisted, over and over, that he was offduty for the duration of the Academy courses. Even with protocols set to standby it was _killing_ him, one micron at a time, the pull at his spark a sharp ache that only fed into and burned with the automatic threat assessments of environmental errors, cascading margins of loss, millions of sparks he wouldn't be able to save, helplessly calculated every time he let his processor idle.

Venting silently, Ironhide curled onto his side, back plates flaring to shift armor density around his struts. It was a glitch. There was no environmental failure, nothing to fix or combat, but he couldn't convince the endless circles of his processor threads. Recharge wasn't possible and it was only the second rotation of a course that would stretch orns. He tucked his helm down against his knee joints, hydraulics creaking tightly, and reflected grimly that he also now understood Rampart's parting gift of a handful of circuit speeders - he wasn't sure how long his systems could go without a recharge cycle, but he suspected he was going to find out.


	3. Promotion

The metal rods were no bigger than his mid-flange servoes, smooth and gleaming with a fresh-extrusion sheen against the dark metal of his palm. Sensor scans - trained to reflex when handed small metal objects - had already reported back a titanium-technotium-iridium alloy that would register in a warm white spectrum through nearly all of the sensor and optical ranges a mech used.

Four of them in all, small and fragile and inexplicably heavy in his hand. His dorsal plates were itching, drawing tighter to his frame; Ironhide vented a full system cycle and set his struts straighter, forcing the fidget down. His vocalizer, when he spoke, had only a thin thread of static to it which was well within acceptable for the surprise he had just been handed. "I... I don't know what to say, sir. Wasn't expecting this."

Wildstrike nodded, the older mech's expression inscrutable from where he sat, heavy hands - mismatched while the raw metal of two and a half newly replaced servos on his right integrated with his usual matte black limb nanite color - splayed across the surface of the desk. "Know you weren't angling for it. That's one of the reasons you're getting it." He flicked a finger against the modest pile of datapads that sat to the side, each marked with the smooth lines of the Guard insignia on their otherwise darkened screens, hard enough to jostle the whole stack. "That, and a list of action reports. Orbital C-8, L-92, E-320, Perscore, z'Qante, that rock outside of Jzeht..."

Ironhide ducked his helm slightly, armor plates shifting in an uneasy motion at the list. "Just did my job, sir."

His captain exvented in a burst, the sound sharp and dismissive. "I need more mechs who 'just do their job'. You do." He pushed back, standing, and came around the desk to face Ironhide, field brushing crisp against the younger mech's with flat, authoritative glyphs. "You've earned it, same as you earned those specialist stars. Congratulations."

Ironhide dropped his optics back to the rods in his hand, plates and field alike tucking in close to his frame. "I... Thank you, sir. I just..." He twisted his other hand up helplessly, glyphs of apology flickering through his field. "I don't want to let you down."

Heavy hands came down on his shoulders, giving him a small shake, just enough to rock his plating. "You won't." The hands tightened as Wildstrike's field shifted and it was abruptly elder cohort, not captain, who drew Ironhide closer. They were of a similar height and mass but long habit dating from his first onlined moments made the younger mech duck down as Wildstrike leaned slightly up, Ironhide's helm fitting beneath his chin. Wildstrike's arms came around the other, the hum of his powerplant taking on a deeper, achingly familiar note of wordless comfort. "You'll do your best, and that's all I'll ever ask. You can do this."

Relief on multiple levels burst through the younger mech's field, coupled with anxiety and the tiny mass deep tremors of trying to hold it all back, glyphs still sketching silent notes of apology. "You sure? I..." His optics flickered, another burst of anxiety stiffening him. "Primus, puts me at sixth, and I..."

Wildstrike huffed a partial ventilation. "That's what's got your lines kinked?" His hand came up, cupping the back of Ironhide's helm as his engine took up the bass rumble harmonic, forming a tangible vibration that translated from frame to frame. Plates tesselated, shifting, until the younger mech was pressed to spark warm inner layers, cupped within the heavy shield of Wildstrike's armor. "Scrap it, bitlet. Sixth or thirteenth, don't matter. I'm not planning on taking a rotation through the Well any time soon."

"Not a bitlet any more," was the half-sparked response, muffled against Wildstrike's shoulder plate.

The older mech chuckled. "I know. And believe me, if we didn't need it I'd give you a pass on this." He field flickered glyphs of regret as he pressed his cheek plate against the top of Ironhide's helm. "'Hide, you're one of the brightest Solarian sparks I know, always giving, always doing for. I'd have sent you for medical if we didn't need weapons so badly-"

"I like guns," Ironhide interjected, but his harmonics echoed traces of youngling to elder, hesitant and seeking approval in ways a first ranked specialist should never have to. Wildstrike's cupping hold against his helm became a sharp flick that rang off his audials, eliciting a flinch and a sound of protest from the younger.

"Yes, well, lucky us," Wildstrike agreed mildly. "Look - I know this ain't what you do naturally, but you do it and you do it well." His field was steady, a solid warm pulse of strength against Ironhide's own. "I need you out there, on the field, pulling afts out of the smelter, but I promise you this - klik you're off the field, we've got your back. You're off the officer roster on ship. Can you do that?"

Ironhide shuttered his optics for a long moment, just soaking in the warmth and assurance of the other's field. He could, he realized, say no. Wildstrike was a good officer, working within the limitations of his squad. Ironhide could say no and the Captain would respect that, but the fact that Wildstrike was offering it to him at all meant the other mech had run every probability already and was willing to take the chance.

They weren't, any of them, in the habit of defying their squad leader. Ironhide cycled a deep ventilation and made himself take a step back, their plates slipping loose from one another until his own were settled crisply back around himself once more.."...yes, sir, Captain."

Approval washed through Wildstrike's field even as the older mech straightened, armor and field duty crisp once more. "Good." He grinned slightly. "You'd best report to medical to let Palisade start drilling, then. I expect to see those inlaid by next shift, Lieutenant." The word was the more startling for being the first time spoken, the Captain's salute sharp and precise across the Guardian brand upon his chestplates. "Congratulations."

Ironhide straightened on reflex, returning the salute just as briskly. "Yes, sir!" The bars of inlay alloy were far heavier in his hand than the slight mass of them had any right to be - would be heavier, by far, as rank glyphs on his shoulder plating - but what the cohort-squad needed came first. If the captain thought he could fill the position, then by Primus, he would.


End file.
